YAPC::NA::Houston registration is open!

jfluhmann writes "Houston.pm is pleased to announce that registration is now open for Yet Another Perl Conference, North America 2007. The conference dates are June 25th through 27th at the University of Houston's central campus in Houston, Texas. The conference will feature speakers from throughout the Perl community, including keynotes from Larry Wall (the creator of Perl), Damian Conway, and The Perl Foundation. Following Chicago.pm's lead, low-cost post-conference training classes provided by noteable Perl trainers will again be available.

kmccombs writes "April's meeting of Mad Mongers features JT Smith presenting on WebGUI. WebGUI, an open source content management system, is built purely on Perl. Developed to run enterprise web environments, WebGUI is easy to use, extremely powerful, and easily customized. JT will discuss developing for WebGUI, highlighting its benefits through a demonstration of the system. This is an excellent opportunity for Perl programmers to learn about developing for WebGUI from one of the creators of the cms himself.

YAPC::Europe: 5 days left to be an Early Bird

Just a quick notice that there are only 5 days left to register for YAPC::Europe with the cheaper early bird tariff (saving 20 Euros) - you'll also have the chance to win one of two coffee table books on Vienna. Early Bird registration ends on 31st March, 23:59.

Barbie was smart enough to discover a slight loophole in our pricing: If you submit a talk proposal and do not register as an early bird and have your proposal rejected, you'll loose 20 Euros (which is still better than submitting an proposal, paying the 80 Euros, and then have your proposal accepted and your ticket fee waived).

So we clarify our rules: If you submit a talk proposal, you'll also be eligible to the reduced 80 Euros fee after March, 31st. Of course you can submit a talk and pay the regular or even the sponsor tariff :-)

Oh, and don't forget that if you submit a talk proposal until March 31st, you're also in for the
book-raffle.

jfluhmann writes "Two weeks remain in the Call For Participation! Visit the ACT-hosted YAPC::NA site to register as a new user (or login with your existing account) and submit a talk proposal. If possible, please indicate (in the comments section) if you consider this talk to be suitable for a beginner, intermediate, or advanced Perl user. Some of the comments from last year indicated a desire to know the level of knowledge expected of talk attendees. See the official CFP posting"

Perl 6 Microgrant - Steve Peters on Parrot Portability

We're pleased to announce that we've selected Steve Peters as
the recipient of the first Perl 6 microgrant. Steve has been
instrumental in helping to ensure that Perl 5 has stayed incredibly
portable forthe past few years. Steve's starting to turn some of his
attention to Parrot. You can find details of the project he's planning
in the text of his grant application:

Perl 6 summary, 25 Feb - 3 Mar, 2007

"It seems you are presuming a Waterfall model of development here. We're not doing the Waterfall, we're doing the Whirlpool, where the strange attractor whirls around with feedback at many levels but eventually converges on something in the middle. In other words, a whirlpool sucks, but the trick is to position your whirlpool over your intended destination, and you'll eventually get there, though perhaps a bit dizzier than you'd like."

Website in a Box

Website in a box is a Catalyst based content management system for individuals and small groups. It's got Google Code project space and a reasonably comprehensive test suite. It does some "Search Engine Optimisation" for you and has been built to be easy to hack on.

It's also a nice application to look at if you want to learn Catalyst.

On Saturday, 17 March 2007, please join us on IRC in #parrot (irc.perl.org) to work on closing out as many RT (https://rt.perl.org/rt3/) tickets as possible in the parrot queue. This will help us get ready for the next release of parrot: 0.4.10, scheduled for Tuesday 20 March 2007. You'll find C, parrot assembly, perl, documentation, and plenty of tasks to go around. Core developers will be available most of the day (starting at around 10am GMT) to answer questions.

The Perl Review, Spring 2007

The next issue of The Perl Review is out, and it's a special edition for the Nordic Perl Workshop! Not only that, the PDF-only price is now only $7. Subscribe now to beat the price increase for US postage rate increases in May.

The Spring 2007 issue of The Perl Review is online and ready for download. Subscribers should have already received an email telling them all about it. In this issue (besides the cover showing Gary Blackburn's license "PERL GOD" license plate), there's:

kmccombs writes "Plain Black programmer Frank Dillon will present at the Mad Mongers monthly meeting, on March 14 at 7:00pm CST. This discussion, relevant to all software programmers, will explore methods to use in effective software architecture. Frank will provide tips and principles that help relieve some of the hurdles and headaches common with project development. Effective client communication, facilitated through the use of functional and technical specifications, help to develop a project that meets and exceeds the user's expectations. A seasoned professional, Frank will provide insight into how the user operates, and how that can be used to the software programmer's advantage to achieve a common goal.

I'm at LA.pm on Monday

I'm in Los Angeles this week, so LA.pm is having a last minute meeting at Ticketmaster at 7 pm on March 12:

Ticketmaster8800 W. Sunset Blvd.West Hollywood, CA 90069

I'll give some sort of presentation, probably about Mastering Perl or something related to it, and hang around for drinks and so on afterward. I might even try to make a podcast out of it now that I've figured out how to use the voice memo thing on my iPod.

YACP::Europe re-scheduled to start a day earlier!

The ESC
Congress 2007 is even bigger than we thought. They expect 15.000 cardiologists, plus their spouses! Due to this, there is nearly not a single
bed available in Vienna for the night from Friday, 31st August to Saturday, 1st September.

As we do not want to force you to leave on the last day of the conference, we decided to reschedule YAPC::Europe to Tuesday, 28th to Thursday, 30th August.

brian_d_foy writes "Komodo 4.0 now allows XPI extensions, the same thing that Firefox has. Create something cool for the Komodo 4.0 Extensibility Challenge and you could win some money or prizes. The contest is open until April 1 (no, really), and you can use the 21-day free preview of Komodo to do it.

ActiveState will go through the entries and put the best on their website to let the community vote on the one they like the best. They'll announce the results at RailsConf 2007 (but that doesn't mean you have to be a Ruby guy to win)."